


I'm ready for more than this (whatever it is)

by TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Superman - All Media Types, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alien Invasion, Aliens, Gen, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 15:25:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1433413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel/pseuds/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy Lewis as the Last Child of Krypton.</p><p>
  <i>New York was being invaded by decidedly unfriendly aliens, and Darcy probably should have been running, but she couldn’t move. Here was more evidence of the greater universe beyond this world, and Darcy was transfixed, even as aliens swarmed the street she was standing in, attacking everything in their path.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm ready for more than this (whatever it is)

**Author's Note:**

> I might re-use this idea at some point because I like it a lot. In the meantime, have this fic.

**I'm ready for more than this (whatever it is)**

In another universe, Jor-El and his wife had a son, a baby boy they sent to safety only minutes before the planet was destroyed. He grew up on an alien planet, among billions upon billions of aliens, and became a shining beacon of hope and justice, a man beyond men who stood out to all who knew of him.

In this universe, Kal-El was a girl. She grew up in a small town on an alien world, feeling different from everyone else in more ways than one, and hitched a lift out of town as soon as she was old enough to run. In another universe, Kal-El learned that being different could be a form a greatness, that to stand apart was to leave your mark upon the world. In this universe, Kal-El learned early that the different were isolated and persecuted, and it was a lesson she took to heart.

Where one Kal-El became a hero, this Kal-El lived an ordinary life under an ordinary name. She lived like everyone else, hiding her strength and her speed and everything which made her different, pretending to be an ordinary human. She worked her way through college without anyone learning her secret, and did her best to forget that she had been born beneath a different sun.

Taking a position with Dr Jane Foster had been impulse more than anything. She needed the credits for her degree, and Jane sounded all kinds of crazy, but… her theories about wormholes, about gateways to other worlds, stirred some wistful longing that Darcy had buried all her life, along with a faint hope that _maybe_ …

So Darcy took the position, despite the fact that the scientist she was working with had lost all credibility among the scientific community. Darcy ran errands and bought coffee and moved equipment, and the entire time some part of her was waiting, despite how ridiculous it was. Then an alien named Thor fell from the sky, and everything changed.

He was only there for a matter of days, but it didn’t matter. Darcy’s world had been turned upside down: there were other aliens out there, just as strange as she was, and for the first time Darcy wasn’t happy with her ordinary life. There were other worlds, perhaps like the one she’d come from, and Darcy didn’t want to keep her feet on the ground any more. She felt out-of-place more than ever, trapped and lost, and it was no use pretending, not any longer.

Jane and her research were snapped up by SHIELD, and somehow Darcy ended up there as well. Her job was much as the same as her internship had been, but Darcy didn’t mind. Her heart was longing for the same stars that Jane’s was, and working to rebuild the Bifrost helped. But it wasn’t quite enough to fill the hole in Darcy’s life, that gap between what she had and what she _should_ have, and so a few days before Jane was transferred to Tromso Darcy quietly went on leave, planning on heading back home to the one part of her past that was left behind: the spacecraft that had brought her to Earth, stored back home in the barn. Maybe, just maybe, Darcy would find some clue that would tell her more about her origins.

* * *

It felt weird coming back to the small town where Darcy had grown up. She’d been such a kid when she left, with no real idea of who she was or what she wanted, just the certain knowledge that she had to get out of there, or she would never find out. The Darcy who was returning was sophisticated  and self-assured compared to the girl who had left years earlier, but it still rankled that Darcy found herself back in a place she’d hoped to leave behind years ago.

Still, here she was, in a band t-shirt and converse and with a pair of hipster glasses perched on her nose (not that she needed them: they were just another part of her pretence at being human), visibly different from the kid who’d left the town in her rear-view mirror years earlier, so that would have to do.

Darcy drove until she reached the farm where she’d grown up. She stopped the car some distance from the house, and wondered whether to go in and say hello. She decided not to: she could do the whole how-are-you-how-have-you-been-doing thing later, but right now, she wanted to get her task over with. So instead of walking up to the house, Darcy turned and headed for the barn, something tight and uneasy in the pit of her stomach.

Inside the barn Darcy untied the ropes holding the tarpaulins that covered her ship, pulling the tarps away until the spaceship was exposed to view. It was only small, Darcy thought: she imagined that human space-shuttles were bigger than this sleek, small craft was. One edge of the ship was crumpled, presumably where it had made impact with the ground during its rough landing, and the door was wedged open, allowing Darcy to see inside the darkened interior.

There was nothing new, nothing that Darcy hadn’t been told about as a kid. The ship was just as she remembered seeing it when she was eight years old, when her parents had answered her questions about why she didn’t seem to fit with truths that were too heavy for someone so young. There was nothing here, no answers to the questions Darcy found herself asking. Taking in a deep breath, trying to quell her sense of disappointment, Darcy covered the ship up again, tying the tarps back in place.

Then, with a sigh, she left the barn and walked up to the house. She might as well stop by and say hello, while she was here.

* * *

Darcy arrived back in New York just in time for the alien invasion. Seriously, fuck her life.

She was out on the street, just out of a Starbucks, coffee in hand, when the sky overhead ripped open and _things_ started pouring out of the hole that was left. People began running and screaming, but Darcy was fixed to the spot where she was standing, staring upwards and breathing too fast, her heart hammering.

New York was being invaded by decidedly unfriendly aliens, and Darcy probably should have been running, but she couldn’t move. Here was more evidence of the greater universe beyond this world, and Darcy was _transfixed,_ even as aliens swarmed the street she was standing in, attacking everything in their path.

And then one raised a blaster in her direction, and suddenly she wasn’t.

Before the alien knew what had happened had Darcy punched it in the face.

Her heart was thumping wildly and she was running on pure terror, but aliens were invading the Earth. If every Darcy was going to stop pretending to be human, now was probably a good time. She punched the other aliens nearby in quick succession, her fist smashing through flesh and bone and _ew_ that was gross, but Darcy didn’t let herself stop. People were screaming further down the street, cornered by a bunch of aliens, and Darcy zipped over at superspeed and took the aliens out before anyone even knew she was there. Then a vast shadow covered her, and Darcy looked up to see a giant thing that looked like a cross between a whale and a turtle moving between the skyscrapers above her, knocking bits of buildings to the ground, the shapes of alien soldiers leaping from it.

Darcy looked back at the people she’d saved, who were staring at her wide-eyed. The smile she gave them was uncertain.

“I guess I should do something about that,” she said. Then she bent her legs, crouching low to the ground, and _leapt._ Gravity failed to take hold, and Darcy shot upwards, heading straight for the alien-whale-thing. It was… swimming?... towards a cluster of tall skyscrapers, and Darcy flew forward until she was in front of it, and turned.  
Hovering in mid-air, she waited, and right before the whale-thing collided with her she threw out both her hands.

It shouldn’t have been enough to stop the whale-thing, but somehow it was. There was nothing for Darcy to brace herself against, nothing but her small self to stop the gigantic menace, but somehow Darcy did it anyway. The whale-alien stopped, juddering, its entire body flipping forward with the force of its own momentum. Darcy watched as the length of it soared over her head and came down again, crashing to the ground. She stared down at it for a long moment, before looking incredulously at her own hands, disbelieving.

She’d known she was strong, of course – she’d been controlling her strength ever since she was a teenager – but _that_ strong?

“Holy shit,” Darcy whispered, still staring at her hands. Then she looked up, and around, at the other whale-things plaguing the city. Slowly she smiled, and took flight.

* * *

Darcy managed to down a second whale-thing by herself, but when she neared a third whale-thing she saw a flash of red on its back, moving amid a swarm of hostile aliens. A closer glance confirmed what she was seeing: Thor was apparently back, and fighting aliens.

Darcy landed on the whale-thing’s back just in time to clock an alien sneaking up on Thor. He heard the meaty _whack_ of Darcy’s fist colliding with the alien’s head and turned, hammer raised.

Darcy grinned at him. Right now she was high on adrenalin, and it felt like she could take on the world.

“Hey big guy!” she called out. “How’s it going?”

“Darcy Lewis?” Thor said in surprise. “But how –”

Darcy smirked and rose up in the air a few feet, demonstrating her ability to fly.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “I’m not really from around here, either.” Then she turned around and punched another alien that was trying to creep up behind her.

“It is good to see you!” Thor shouted, as he hit a different alien with his hammer.

“You too!” Darcy shouted, right before an angry green guy landed on the whale-thing’s back and punched through it’s skull. Darcy flew free as the whale-thing flipped and crashed into the ground.

“Gross, but effective,” she mused, and took off to kill more aliens. She had a feeling that she was going to have a massive freak-out later, but right now, the adrenalin high was still dominating everything.

Some time later – Darcy had no idea how much time had passed – Iron Man went shooting past, holding something that looked suspiciously like a missile.

“What the hell?” Darcy asked aloud, looking up as Iron Man headed straight for the portal in the sky. As she watched, he vanished into it. Only a couple of minutes later the aliens started falling like puppets with cut strings, and Darcy whooped and raised a fist in celebration.

She looked back up at the portal in time to see it growing smaller, and held her breath, realising that there was still no sign of Iron Man.

Only seconds before the portal closed, Iron Man reappeared, falling like a rock. He showed no signs of stopping.

“Crap,” Darcy muttered under her breath, and zoomed forwards, heading straight for the falling red and gold shape in the sky.

She reached him when he was halfway to the ground, and although the armour probably  should have been heavy, she caught him with ease. Glancing at the ground below, she sank slowly through the air, searching the Iron Man armour for some way to open the face-plate so she could check if Stark was okay.

She hit the street a few moments later, and decided to hell with it. She laid Stark down and ripped the face-plate off the armour, vaguely registering several other people joined her.

“Is he okay?” an unfamiliar male voice asked, and Darcy glanced up … to see both Thor, and a concerned looking guy in a Captain America suit with a face straight of WWII-era newsreels, WTF. She choked, but managed to get herself under control despite being in the presence of the guy she had _idolized_ in her teens.

“I don’t think he’s breathing,” she said worriedly, glancing back down at Stark. The angry green guy bounded over, staring down at Stark, apparently concerned as well. Then he bellowed in Stark’s direction, and Stark’s eyes shot open with panicked gasps.

“Easy, dude,” Darcy told him. “Deep breaths, you can do it.”

“What?” Stark looked around wildly. “Who are you? What just happened?”

“We won,” said Captain America, sounding amazed about it.

“And then you fell out of the sky, so I caught you,” Darcy added. “Then the big green guy here bellowed you back to consciousness.”

“Alright, hey, good job guys,” Stark said, somewhere between euphoric and wild around the eyes. “Let’s just not come in tomorrow. Let’s just take a day. Have you guys ever tried shawarma? There’s a shawarma joint about two blocks from here, I don’t know what it is but I want to try it.” His eyes settled back on Darcy, and he blinked at her. “Seriously, though, who are you, again?”

“This is Darcy Lewis,” said Thor, walking forward to pat Darcy on the back with strength that probably would have felled anyone else. Darcy didn’t so much as flinch. “She is a friend of mine, from the last time I was on Midgard. She fought valiantly against our invading foes!”

“Yeah,” said Darcy, “I totally fought… aliens…”

And suddenly Darcy was hyperventilating, and Captain America was making her sit down with a hand on her shoulder and telling her to breathe deeply.

“Oh my God, I just fought aliens in front of everyone in New York!” Darcy wailed, clutching at her hair. “ _Everyone!_ What am I going to do? Everyone’s going to know what I can do!”

“What _can_ you do?” Stark asked, sounding curious. Darcy waved a hand at him.

“That’s not important! SHIELD’s going to ask me all kinds of questions and find out I’m an alien and maybe lock me away for ever!”

Captain America blinked.

“You’re an alien?”

“I crashed here when I was a baby,” Darcy sniffed. “There was this hologram when my parents found me, before the power for my ship went out, that said my home planet was about to be destroyed and I was the only one with the chance to survive. That’s all I know, really. Oh, God.” She buried her face in her hands. “I am seriously freaking out. Help.”

Thor crouched down to pat her on the shoulder, his expression reassuring.

“Rest assured, Darcy, I shall allow no one to harm you,” he told her.

“Hello, I single-handed stopped a whale-thing by myself, no one’s harming me,” Darcy told him furiously. “That doesn’t mean they can’t ruin my life. But thanks,” she added belatedly. Taking a deep breath, and trying to get her freak-out under control, she looked back at Stark. “You said something about shawarma, right? Because I could eat, like, a horse right now.”

“Yeah, shawarma,” said Stark, sitting up. He looked around. “Where’d my face-plate go? Anyone see it?”

Captain America picked it up and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” said Stark. He listened to something Darcy couldn’t hear for a second. “The others are on their way. Barton, Romanov, we’ll meet you there – you can’t miss it, it’s practically the only building left on that block.” He looked at Darcy and the others. “Coming?”

“I could use a bite to eat,” said Captain America.

* * *

Which was how Darcy found herself half an hour later chomping down shawarma, with Thor eating enthusiastically on her left and Captain America nodding off to sleep on her right, while Tony Stark stared into space like the events of the day were catching up to him and the other three sat and ate like normal human beings.

Darcy glanced sideways at Captain America.

“So, you were kind of my hero, growing up,” she said in a rush. Captain America started slightly, and blinked at her.

“Sorry?”

“I said, you were kind of my hero growing up,” Darcy told him, a little shyly. “I mean, you had some of the same abilities I did, but you _did_ something with them, you know? Me, I was always too afraid to stand out too much.”

Captain America considered that.

“Well, you did something with them today,” he said, and offered her a smile that was tired, but friendly.

“Yeah,” Darcy said thoughtfully. “I guess I did.”

She went back to eating shawarma, thinking about that. Her thoughts were interrupted by her phone going off in her pocket. Darcy pulled it out and put it to her ear.

“Hello?”

“ _Darcy Lewis!_ ” yelled a familiar voice, and Darcy grinned a bit as she recognised that it was Jane on the other end. “ _What were you doing punching aliens? It’s all over the TV! How did you do that?_ ”

“I missed you too,” said Darcy. “Here, talk to Thor.” She shoved her phone in Thor’s direction. “Hey, big guy, Jane’s on the phone, she wants to talk to you.”

Thor took the phone and cautiously fitted it to his ear, as he’d just seen Darcy do.

“Jane?” he asked, and a moment later a delighted grin spread over his face, presumably as Jane answered him. He launched into an enthusiastic recounting of how he’d come to be in New York, pausing now and again to let Jane speak, nodding as he listened.

Darcy nodded in satisfaction, and went back to her shawarma and her thoughts.

She’d always planned to keep her abilities a secret, but there was no point in trying now, not when pictures of her fighting aliens were probably being beamed all over the world as she ate. Part of her was still terrified, she wasn’t going to lie, not to herself, but at the same time… at the same time, she felt more like herself than she’d ever been. It was, in its own way, a good feeling.

She glanced around at the others, at Thor and Captain America and Tony Stark and the Spy Twins, and the dude who was sometimes an angry green guy. If her abilities had to be known, well, at least she was in good company.

“Hey, Stark,” she called out, and Stark glanced over. “I came into this kind of late, but does our band of adventurers have any kind of name yet?”

Stark gave her a long, assessing look, and finally nodded. Darcy felt like she’d just been given some kind of test.

“Sure. We’re the, uh, Avengers.”

“The Avengers,” Darcy repeated. She considered the name. “Very cool.”

The Avengers. Yeah, she could work with that.

 


End file.
